Project Clients Vs. Product Customers – How To Maintain Sanity By Building Products

Posted in Startups on Oct 14th, 2011 | 4 comments

I’ve read about quite a few startup founders who started working as consultants or at web agencies where they cut their teeth and learned about development, project bidding, and project management. The problem is that: 1) Client work is a soul sucking endeavor that will leave most people hating their work after a few years and 2) it’s a black hole of quick money that will sometimes lock you in and prevent you from taking the bold steps to actually build a product and break free from the catch-22 that is having clients.

Below are my thoughts on the difference between Project Clients and Product Customers and why having a product is infinitely better in the long run.

Project Clients

When you work at an agency or as a freelancer or consultant, you have project clients. Project clients are people who come to you with their problem and it’s your job to fix it, or build it, or make it better. The reason they’re coming to you is because they don’t have the personnel or tools internally to complete the task, or don’t have the time or bandwidth internally to tackle the project themselves. (more…)

Competitors Are Awesome You Dummy

Posted in Startups on Oct 13th, 2011 | 3 comments

The bane of any startup founder’s existence is the emergence of competitors, or the discovery of competitors after dreaming up an amazing idea. It can certainly be discouraging to find out there are other people out there as brilliant and creative as you are, but there are many advantages to having competitors that most people never discuss. Here are a few of my favorite things about having competitors:

1) Competitors validate your model and niche/market.

The big buzzword nowadays is “disruptive ideas”…projects and startups that flip a market on its head and make everyone see things in a totally different way. It’s extremely difficult to predict whether a disruptive idea will actually stick and take hold, and even harder to test such a belief. So this often leads to people believing in and launching projects and ideas into markets that literally don’t exist.

The Lean Startup movement is all about testing your niche or market thoroughly before actually committing time and money and effort into actually building things out. This is smart. The simplest, easiest way to test a market? Look for competitors. Look for companies that have done something similar to what you’ve had in mind, see how they’re doing it, how people like it, how much they charge. Dissect them. Then make them your bitch. (more…)